


stormcaptain

by brophigenia



Series: that boy is a monster [3]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Child Death, Gen, Kidnapping? Stormtrooper Recruitment?, Nongraphic Limb Loss, Phasma backstory, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 19:57:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10997910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: what you're capable ofisn't always good.





	stormcaptain

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys, so here's a bit of an interlude. Warnings for violence, child death, taking children off to become Stormtroopers, and Snoke. Also mentions of limb loss but only after the fact.

_you will have never loved for nothing;  
__you’ve long seen your downfall_ _  
_ _spelled out in another’s bones_

In the beginning, the women die first.

The popular aesthetic among the Empire’s ranks had been slimness, utilitarian levels of body fat, skipping meals and surveying the protrusion of bone under naked skin in ornate mirrors with satisfaction. This, as it turns out, is not the best way to prepare oneself to survive the life of a refugee.

Phasma is raised by someone’s grandmother-- not her own. Her mother dies when she is very young, and her father probably died on the Death Star. This is what Ama tells her when she is old enough to want to know but smart enough not to ask. Ama says _you must’ve been Nissa’s child,_ because after so many years it’s hard to remember which blonde-haired child was which and which of the many corpse-girls they’d sprung from originally. _She was tall, too._ It goes without saying that even if Nissa had been tall she had also been too weak to survive shivering seven-moon winters in one-room shacks on a nameless planet.

She has no last name. In the confusion, everyone seemed to shake off surnames and cling to the nameless classlessness that brought them all tighter together than families were before. She is Phasma, and later she can introduce herself as _Phasma, of Nissa_ in the manner of all Imperial girl-orphans. The boys do not survive long without their fathers, and the ones who do have fathers are taken off into the splinter groups to try and find a new fortune in the metropolitan areas of other planets.

Before the splintering, though, Phasma’s brood contains boys and girls alike.

Being bigger, if not necessarily older, Ama teaches her to care for the children. _If you let them wander off or don’t remember to make them eat they’ll die,_ Ama says with no real emotion in her voice, numb by now to ruined corpses and wasted potential where once they’d all been at the top of the galaxy’s pecking order. Phasma remembers these words; she remembers them even more after the first of her pack wanders too far away from her while she’s distracted. The girl is found half an hour later drowned in a tar pit.

Phasma will not forget the sight of her little corpse for as long as she lives.

She remembers the General from when they were children. _Armitage,_ a great big name for such a small thing, all skin and bones and shivering. He had furious eyes, she noticed, deceptively reflective like transparisteel. She slipped more oats into his bantha milk than she probably should and endured the vicious growl of her stomach later with grim satisfaction when she had to take an extra-small portion for herself in return.

After the splintering, there is more food to go around. Phasma is by far the tallest of her cohort, and with their settlement being all little girls and the elderly, she becomes their ox. They push more food on her at the end of the day, and she refuses it until Ama catches her swaying on her feet one day after a long day’s work in one of their middling fields followed by a shift on patrol around their shanty village. After that, she eats all of her double-portions under the old woman’s watchful eye, crouched in the corner of their biggest shack with everyone crowded around her. The other girls smile big at her and chatter about their days and the gossip they’ve managed to glean from the scarce few fieldhands they can afford to hire from town. They look at her for approval like she’s their mother, and in some ways she supposes she is.

The patrols are normally quiet and unneeded. She carries an ancient blaster for show-- for years she’s not sure if it would even still fire.

One night, she finds out.

It’s an arid night, the air thick with silty dust, and she wears a ragged kerchief over half of her face to keep her breathing clear. The wind stings her eyes and the chemlight in her hand is on its last legs. She’s about to yawn when someone sweeps up behind her and wraps their arm across her chest, pressing something sharp against her neck.

The intruder is not expecting much of a fight, she realizes, oddly calm even with a knife to her throat, though he did come prepared for one. He hisses in her ear something she can’t understand-- not Basic, she thinks, but the hand on her is definitely humanoid.

She is untrained in combat, but she thinks of the shacks full of her girls, sleeping curled up like kittens all together against the coolness of the night, and she rears back, away from the knife and hopefully shoving her boniest parts into something vital. The intruder doesn’t expect her to do that. A fist swings out and bloodies her lip, and all she is narrows into _violence._  

After, the intruder is a mangled mess of something that may have been human once or may have not, and Phasma has a gash running across her face that will eventually close and heal into a thick, white, jagged line of remembrance. She shakes and points the blaster at the ruined, pulpy mess that was once a face and fires, half-hysterical in the dark.

Her girls cry over her, shaking and scared; the old people are grim and silent when they look at what she has done, calculating. Phasma does not cry; there is a grave to be dug. No one can know what happened. The tensions between their camp and the nearby town are already strained enough. She will not be the reason they’re all slaughtered in their beds by New Republic soldiers.

When she’s seventeen, the strongest of the splinter groups returns for them. They’re all bundled away into a rust bucket garbage transport, and the first time Phasma sees her own reflection in ten standard years, it is a warped thing staring back at her from a salvaged chromium panel. There’s not much tone-- just a vague impression of a girl with short blonde hair and broad shoulders. The scar isn’t there. She could be anyone.

She likes that. It strikes a chord. It stays with her.

The first time she puts on the white and black armor of a Stormtrooper, she’s eighteen and she’s spent the last year effectively running the agricultural sector of the Supreme Leader’s wasteland planet. Everyone is too afraid to talk about how disappointing the place is. Phasma looks around and watches her girls dig up rocks until their fingers bleed. No matter what tricks she uses to aerate the soil and make it more hospitable their crop production is always lacking.

She puts on the armor of some Stormtrooper long dead. The others fit more easily in it-- they are smaller than her. The clone troopers who wore this armor were all of five feet and seven standard inches tall. Even at eighteen, Phasma has reached a height of six feet.

They raid a prosperous village on a planet that still uses a serf system. The rich grow fat while the poor work themselves to the bone. Phasma leads the charge on silent feet. The blaster now in her hands is only a few years old; she is a better shot than she was that night on the edge of the old homeplace, desecrating some nameless thing.

They kill the adults quietly. Phasma’s hands don’t shake, because the entire time she thinks about her people back on the new homeworld, about their hollowed cheeks and fever-bright eyes. They don’t use blasters because it’s a waste of a charge and it attracts too much attention. The helmet makes everything seem foggy, less like it’s something she’s doing and more like something she’s dreaming, like she’s going to wake up later and not be a killer.

The farmers’ blood soaks the ground and Phasma supervises the collection of their winter storage of crops, all neatly collected to send off to the nearby manor. She feels suddenly sick and steps off to take off the helmet and throw up, and that’s when she sees them.

The children are thin and wind-burnt and dressed in rags, dirty-fingernailed waifs and orphans, now, too. Because of her. She thinks about them waking up to see their parents dead, everyone they’ve ever known dead. She thinks about this and then she thinks about the little girl in the tar pit, the way her tiny hands looked all curled up and stiffening unnaturally.

Phasma makes a decision.

The Stormtrooper corps are her idea. They take all ages, first, but then only children under the age of five standard years, so as not to foster resentment or grudges. The youngest ones are the most easily adapted to a new world order. She teaches them the importance of order. _There is a reason for every season,_ she tells them, quoting Ama, dead now for years, an aching absence that will never fade, not even when she puts on the chromium for the first time and hears herself called _Captain._ She puts masks on their faces so they don’t have to face what destruction they’ve wrought. So she doesn’t have to look around at them and think _I made you kill. I made you killers._

She reports her progress directly to the Supreme Leader, at first. It makes her shudder with dread whenever she gets a summons to his cave of a receiving hall. He is an unnatural thing. She has never been uncomfortable looking at corpses, and somehow he is worse, like something reanimated after it spent a few days rotting in a hole. When he tells her that she will now be reporting directly to _General Hux_ her relief is palpable enough to make him laugh. In her head, he whispers _you are a clever thing, hmm?_ and the look in his eyes is almost like lust but more like the way a cat looks at a field mouse, waiting.

She vomits afterward, wipes her mouth, and then goes to see the General.

The First Order rises.

She looks at FN-2187 (her idea, again, the numbers-- wouldn’t it be easier to excuse yourself if you didn’t have an identity? A till does not need to apologize to the earthworms it kills in the process of turning over a field, making everything ready to prosper) and wants to say _understand me_ when he looks at her like she’s a monster. All she has ever wanted to do is to save them, make them a part of the group. Give them a purpose, somewhere to belong.

The Wookie stuffs her into the trash compactor. The old smuggler’s eyes are bright when he suggests it, like he thinks it’s funny. Like he thinks he’s knocking her down a peg. She thinks about how every meal was half-soured bantha milk and stale oats, how her bones would ache when she was young from the cold and the lack of proper sustenance. She looks at FN-2187 and thinks about where she found him and the rest of the FN squadron, huddled and half-starved in the dark with no one to protect him. She thinks about the warm clothes that every one of the Stormtrooper corps received, about the three meals they ate every day, perfectly portioned and calculated for maximum nutritional value, the bunks they were assigned and the blankets and sheets that were washed once a week and replaced once a year. FN-2187’s eyes are full of fury and joy and vengeance.

(She _took care_ of him.)

She lays on her back in the trash compactor and listens to the sirens wail. _The planet is going to explode,_ she thinks numbly. It’s going to explode and she’s going to die here in the dark, all alone, faceless in her chromium armor.

When she was fifteen, she dug a grave.

The war never ended; the empire fell. The empire keeps falling. Only the names and dates change. They are fighting a losing battle.

(Phasma does not die. Only parts of her do.)

Later (months later) she stands on an observation bridge a pace behind the General. He is too thin still even after all these years, and she makes a mental note to send a missive to the mess hall that he needs more protein and carbs in his diet. The replacement arm he had made for her is shining chromium from the shoulder down. The symbol of the First Order is emblazoned on its bicep in lurid, victorious crimson. She wears cloth instead of chromium, the crisp uniform heavier somehow than the armor ever was.

It is time to own her decisions; it is time to stare at the fires she’s lit with naked eyes.


End file.
